And the Oscar Goes To . . .
Apr 3rd, 2008 by Brian
When Oscar was born I went out and bought a video camera with the notion that I’d be capturing every adorable thing he did and creating compelling, award-winning movies that would be the envy of families everywhere.
Well, somewhere along the road to the Academy Awards we discovered that, like most things with young kids, reality doesn’t always meet your expectations. First, it’s a real pain to carry a video camera with you every where you go (as if we don’t have enough stuff to haul around as it is). Second, editing video is hard. Transferring 60 minutes of footage of Oscar rolling around on the floor from the camera to the computer is pretty tedious — and then what do you do with it once you’ve got it there? Finding just the right 5 minutes that someone might actually want to sit and watch is no easy task.
To make matters worse, our video camera recently started acting a big wonky (wouldn’t turn on, strange error messages, etc). I decided that it might be time to get something new. A briefly flirted with the idea of buying one of those fancy new high-definition camcorders but ultimately decided that I couldn’t really justify the cost.
So, it dawned on me that picture quality really wasn’t the thing I should be worried about — what I needed to be looking for was something that would actually make the entire process of shooting and sharing video easier. That’s when I cam across the Flip Video Ultra Camcorder.
Instead of overwhelming you with features, the Flip strips the idea of a camcorder down to the bare essentials — it doesn’t do much beyond basic recording and playback, but that’s really all I was looking for. It’s considerably cheaper than the last camcorder I bought (between $100 and $150 depending on model) and it runs on 2 AA batteries so you don’t have expensive, proprietary batteries/chargers to purchase. It doesn’t require that you haul around any tapes/discs/cards — everything is recorded to 2GB of non-removable flash memory (about 60 minutes of recording time).
Since your video is stored in flash memory, it’s incredibly simple to thumb through the clips you’ve shot and delete the ones you don’t want (like deleting pictures on your digital camera) — try doing that with tape!
The killer feature though has got to be the built-in USB connector. Connecting the camera to your computer will automatically launch the built-in software which allows you to browse/play/copy/edit your videos in a pretty simple interface. What’s more, there’s an “Upload to YouTube” option that will automatically upload your clips to the popular video sharing site.
All of the video that we’ve posted on this blog was shot with the Flip. Note that YouTube isn’t known for its picture quality so those clips aren’t really representative of the video quality of the Flip — take a look at the video of Laurel crawling for a better indication.
The Flip is somewhat limited in that it doesn’t really have any zoom or picture adjustments that you can make. And I will sort of miss the NightShot feature on my old Sony for those shots of the kids snoring at night. However, if you’re looking for an incredibly simple device for quickly shooting video and sharing it on the web, this is hard to beat.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t be winning the Oscar for “Best Video of My Kids” (that is a category, right?) but at least we’ve now got a way to easily get some shots of the kids and get them out there for the grandparents to see.
Verdict: Highly Recommend
Wife Acceptance Factor: High
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